MSDN Southern Fried Roadshow

I spent last Friday at an event put on by Microsoft, called the MSDN Southern Fried Roadshow. It lasted for the entire day, and much to my surprise was actually really informative. The day started off with a big overview of Windows Azure. Azure is Microsoft's cloud operating system that will debut sometime next year. From what we saw you will be able to run your .NET apps (with support for other languages in the future) and your SQL Server databases in the cloud, running on as many instances as you wish. Pricing was not announced, so I am curious to see the final price tag for Azure. They did say it will be a pay as you use it type of structure (similar to what Amazon does I would guess).

The second part of the day was spent on discussing Silverlight 2. I never really played around with version of 1 of Silverlight so I am not familiar with some of the new enhancements. They did point out right from the start that you can now program your Silverlight 2 apps using C# or VB, instead of using JavaScript. That seems cool.

To end the day they covered two ASP.NET areas, Dynamic Data Services and the MVC framework they are working on. The Dynamic Data Services piece really blew me away. In a few clicks in Visual Studio the presenter had a fully functional CRUD website built. It handled all the selects, inserts, updates and deletes for the entire database. You can drill down into the code and customize almost everything it's doing from project to project. It was really a nice little demo.

To end the day they covered the MVC framework that should be released in the next year or so for ASP.NET. There is not enough space to cover everything here, but just think of it as a nice MVC framework that has some really nice URL modding built into it.

Again, I was not expecting much from this little one day event, but in the end it was very informative and I came away with some new knowledge and some new technologies on the horizon.